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Anglicanism and Catholicity

Impressions of a Continental Observer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2024

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Once he has crossed the Channel the continental very quickly discovers that the Church of England is quite unlike the protestant communities he knows in France or Belgium. Instead of bare conventicles he finds churches—very often fine ones, with altar, cross, statues, even red lamps in the sanctuary and confessionals. The liturgical vestments are similar to our own. Some of the services offer the same general characteristics. There are religious communities which are curiously like our monasteries both in their rule and in the piety, earnestness and influence for good of their members. If he is lucky the enquiring visitor may come into contact with members of the Anglican church quite close to his faith or come across theological works in which the vocabulary, the terms of reference and the subjects treated are familiar to him.

The hurried traveller will even be able to go back with the conviction that the things which separate us from the Anglicans are few. There is papal infallibility but this has doubtless been badly explained to them and since its definition the Popes have exercised it so little that Catholic theologians are not even all agreed as to its exact exercise. The Anglicans use an English liturgy? But there are many languages other than Latin in the Church of Rome. In short, he thinks, there are chiefly stupid misunderstandings and obstinacies. From this point to thinking that Be union is easy there is only one step, a step which is sometimes crossed and which is the cause of generous overtures doomed to failure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 29 , Issue 344 , November 1948 , pp. 507 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The Church is not bound by documents of the continental Reformation or by the opinions of individual divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth, centuries. Hodgson: The doctrine of the Church as held and taught in the Ch. of B. Oxford, 1946, p. 21. Cf. E. Cant on Gore in the Church Quarterly Review, July-Sept., 1946.

2 v.g. B. J Bicknell: A theological introduction to the XXXIX Articles, 1946. pp. 23 ss.

3 E.g. Conference Between W. Laud and Mr Fisher the Jesuit. Edited by C. H. Simpkinson, Macmillan, 1901, p. 59, and Stillingfleet's commentary.

4 H.M.S. in the Church Quarterly Review, 1934, vol. 112, p. 368.

5 v.g. Ign. Ant. ad Smyrn VIII, 2. Pol. Mart. VIII, 1, XVI, 2, XIX, 2. Cyr Hier. Cat. XVIII, 23. Vine. Ler. Comm., 2, etc.

6 On this subject, read T. A. Laoey, ‘Catholicity’, London, 1914, p. 16, and the controversy with The Tablet published in 1916 by Chatto and Windus.

7 Cf. A letter by B. Every in the Church Times, 10th Sept., 1948.

8 cf. ‘Catholicity’, p. 52.

9 ibid. p. 55.

10 On this point great endeavours would have to be made in the sense of a larger ‘incarnation’. Too many Catholics more or less consciously confuse Romanism and Italianism. The letter published by the Catholic Herald, Sept. 10th, 1948, entitled ‘Catholicity in English dress’, should be read.